Masters of Disaster

by Gary Paulsen

  This book is dedicated to my dear friend

  Craig Virden;

  always a wonderful boy at heart

  who knew the joy of bringing books to boys

  and boys to books.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - The Launch of a Grand Plan

  Chapter 2 - Breaking the Record

  Chapter 3 - Wildlife in the Woods

  Chapter 4 - Night of the Living Sludge

  Chapter 5 - The Headless, Blood-Drinking, Flesh-Eating Corpses of Cleveland

  Chapter 6 - Cowboys and Fishermen

  Chapter 7 - The Last Great Race/Memorial Day Parade Disaster

  Chapter 8 - Propaganda and Turtle Dregs

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  The Launch of a Grand Plan

  “I’ve called you here today, men, because I have an important announcement. One that will change our lives.”

  Henry Mosley licked his finger and carefully flipped a page of densely scribbled notes on the yellow legal pad in front of him. He cleared his throat, looked up and made eye contact with his audience.

  Henry’s audience was small—just Reed Hamner and Riley Dolen, his best friends—and they were sitting at his kitchen table after school, but still, he knew that every good public speaker, not to mention every effective leader, understood the significance of Looking a Man in the Eye.

  Henry Mosley was twelve years old. He had recently watched a documentary about General Douglas MacArthur with his grandfather, an army veteran, during which he had been very impressed with Military Precision and Choosing Words Carefully, not to mention Examples of Bravery and Inventiveness.

  Earlier, at school, Henry had told Reed and Riley that he needed to speak with them regarding a Subject of the Utmost Importance and that they should meet at his house at precisely 1600 hours.

  Reed had been late, of course, because it took him a while to figure out what 1600 hours was, and he was always late because he got lost a lot, even though he only lived three streets over. Riley had not only been on time, but he had also brought granola bars and Ziploc bags of fresh vegetables and bottles of water for all three of them because he knew that meetings required snacks, and Riley was always prepared. Always.

  “I am proposing,” Henry continued, reading carefully from his notes, “that we Undertake and Implement a Series of Daring Experiences and Grand Adventures the likes of which the history of Western civilization has never seen, at least not from twelve-year-olds in suburban Cleveland.”

  Reed scratched his ear and looked confused. Reed frequently looked confused. Riley snapped a carrot stick in half and looked thoughtful—his usual expression.

  “Why?” Reed finally asked, a hint of panic in his voice. “Why are we underwhatsitting and imple-whoositting?”

  “Henry’s got spring fever,” Riley explained, somewhat dismissively, Henry thought.

  “What I have in mind is so much bigger than that,” Henry said. “I’m working to create a series of tasks that will Prove Our Manhood and show us What We’re Made Of. And if we play our cards right, we just might Alter the Course of History a time or two. And, of course, Impress Girls and Get Them to Notice Us.”

  “What made you start thinking about things like experiences and adventures and bravery and what we’re made of?” Reed was chewing a fingernail and looking as if he had to go to the bathroom. Urgently.

  “English class.”

  “What happened during fifth period?” Riley asked. “And what got you talking so official-like and, I dunno, epic?” Henry had a way of always sounding like whatever he was currently reading or watching, and Riley racked his brains to remember whether their reading list lately had included any books about military history or Greek mythology.

  “Remember how we read Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island and the book about how the kids tried to save their father from the space-time continuum thingie and that other book about the boy who got stuck in the woods after a plane crash? I got to thinking—what would our stories be like? What would an author write about us? Let’s face facts: We may be the most boring twelve-year olds on the planet.”

  “We’re not boring, Henry,” Reed said in a small voice.

  “Really? Because I’ve been thinking about our lives lately and perfect attendance does not count as exciting.”

  “Well, we don’t just go to school, we also, um, we, ah, well, there’s … and then, of course, er …” Reed looked to Riley for help, but Riley just shrugged.

  “Exactly,” Henry said. “Nothing interesting ever happens. Luckily, I have plenty of ideas.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “You leave the details to me.” Henry patted his legal pad confidently.

  “Does that mean you’re in charge? Like the boss or something?” Reed always cared about who was in charge. He was the only boy in his family—he had three older sisters and three younger sisters—and he never got his way at home. Never. Not ever.

  “Of course not. This is a democracy; we vote on everything.”

  “Then I vote no. I don’t want to complain or worry anyone, but adventures sound dangerous. And I have a curfew. I don’t have time to change history if I have to be in the house by eight o’clock on weekdays. Or whatever the new way of saying eight o’clock is.”

  “The voting starts later, when I tell you each plan. The idea to go ahead with Becoming Men of Action and Daring, Masters of Adventure, well, I’ve already made that executive decision for all of us.”

  “Like I said, my curfew is eight on school nights and that’s only if I’ve gotten my homework done. And doesn’t daring usually mean painful? I don’t like pain.”

  “There might be some pain,” Henry allowed, “but not much. Probably. Hardly any. Maybe a little, but no blood. Definitely no blood. Well, okay, maybe a smidge, but not enough to worry about.” To Reed, Henry sounded as if he’d be disappointed if there weren’t pain and blood.

  “What do you think?” Reed looked at Riley, who had been taking notes. Riley’s mother was a reporter and his father was a court stenographer, so Reed and Henry were used to seeing Riley quietly scribbling in a notebook, not only in class, but during routine conversations. Riley’s attention to detail had resolved more than a few arguments over the years when they went back and consulted his jottings. He wasn’t a big talker like Henry and he wasn’t a nervous babbler like Reed. He took notes.

  “I want to see what happens,” Riley said now, looking up from his notebook. “I’m in.”

  “See? Even without a formal vote, majority rules,” Henry said, smiling.

  Reed put his head between his knees and tried to breathe slowly because he’d heard that this technique made your heart stop racing and helped the swirly blobs in front of your eyes go away. The upside-down position only made his ears ring more loudly.

  “I’m going to tweak the ideas for a few more days,” Henry said to the top of Reed’s head, “and we’ll reconvene this weekend and get started.”

  “Reconvene?” Reed asked. “You mean meet up?”

  “Don’t worry, Reed,” Riley said. “I know a website where you can draw up your last will and testament.” Although he was only twelve, Riley had already written several drafts of his own will. He liked to be prepared.

  “See how interesting things have gotten already?” Henry asked. “Did you think when you got up in the morning that you’d be writing a will in the afternoon? My plan is revving things up around here.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the kind of person who was meant for an interesting life,” Reed said, raising his head. “I think my Inner Courageous Guy might
be hibernating. Or nonexistent.”

  “That’s exactly why we need to start doing Interesting Things That Will Build Our Character,” Henry said. “Otherwise we could wind up like Dwight Hauser.”

  Reed and Riley both frowned. At their school, Dwight Hauser was just another way of saying “stuck-up, pushy jerk,” “puke-spewing slimeball” or “nose-picking, booger-eating punk.” Dwight Hauser was an out-and-out bully, but Henry, Riley and Reed knew that he was yellow clear through, because he only picked on girls or younger kids. Hauser was always surrounded by a rumor-spreading group of tiny-minded toadies who had been scheming for years to slip iguana poop into the beef stew in the lunchroom.

  “Well, if you put it like that,” Reed said, “I’ll keep you guys company. If you insist.”

  “You wait and see,” Henry said. “You’re going to wind up thanking me for coming up with this Plan of Action. I have a feeling, men, that it’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to us.”

  2

  Breaking the Record

  “I have it: the absolutely perfect first idea.”

  Henry held up a yellow legal pad covered with calculations. He was sitting next to Reed and Riley on his back steps the following Saturday morning. They’d met at 0900 hours, which wasn’t too tricky for Reed to figure out, but he was still late because he’d overslept and then he’d taken a right when he meant to take a left at the Petersons’ house on the corner because Erika Peterson was getting in the car to go to figure-skating lessons and Reed thought Erika was so pretty he had a hard time telling right from left when he saw her.

  Riley, of course, had been early and had brought a three-ring binder full of loose-leaf paper, a small digital voice recorder with extra batteries, a new box of mechanical pencils, and a morning snack of three oranges, because he believed in being prepared. For any eventuality. Always.

  “Perfect idea for what?” Reed’s voice was shaking and he wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans.

  “Our first adventure. Men, we’re ready to begin.”

  “You sound so sure. But how do you know?” Reed’s voice cracked. “I’m not at all sure we’re anywhere near ready. I mean, you know, ready is such a big word. Maybe you should tell us what you’re thinking about first and then we can talk about it for a while, a really long while, because it might take us a long time to get ready. If, you know, we ever are.”

  Henry waved the legal pad, which was covered with sketches and formulas and diagrams and notes and printouts from Web articles as if he were swatting away Reed’s worries like flies.

  “We have to do something that breaks a record.” He paused dramatically. Henry jotted a few more notes while Reed stared off into space, thinking of how much he loved his family, even his third-littlest sister, and how much he would miss them, kind of, when one of Henry’s record-breaking plans got him killed. Because breaking records went hand in hand with the possibility of death—no one ever broke records by sitting quietly or petting the cat. Breaking records usually had to do with speed and sometimes sharp objects or explosive devices and paramedics standing by with a defibrillator and fire extinguishers.

  Riley pondered Henry’s announcement. “Do you mean a city record? Or county? Or state?”

  Henry shook his head. “World record. Otherwise nobody will pay any attention.”

  “Of course.” Riley underlined world in his notes.

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought.” Henry flipped to the second page of his legal pad. “The hardest part was deciding just what record to break, or make, since some of the ones I thought about have never been done. There’s no current record for kids staying alive underwater. Weird, huh? And I was bummed to find out that there’s, um, what’s it called?”—he consulted his pad—“an ‘ethics regulation’ against getting a white rat drunk and then teaching him to drive a model car in order to do a study of drunk driving—something about cruelty to animals, even though I’d have put a tiny seat belt on the rat. And my research about making a capsule and riding in an oil pipeline from one pumping station to the next, you know, to see what it’s like to be oil, didn’t work out. Everyone I called hung up on me.”

  “Living underwater? Driving rats? Oil?” Reed muttered numbly as he watched Riley list the possible records in neat columns.

  “Since this is our first try,” Henry continued, “I figure we need to start with resources we can easily find and a situation that’s at least kind of familiar. The perfect solution, obviously, is bikes.” He jumped up to face them. “We are going to break the world record for the most forward airborne somersaults on a bike.”

  Silence.

  “Exactly,” Henry said. “It’s perfect. I knew you’d agree.”

  At last Reed said, “I’ve watched those extreme bike competitions on TV. Those guys are amazing, doing backflips and twists and off-the-bike somersaults—two, sometimes two and a half or even three complete rolls with a full doppelganger and a whizbanger or whatever they call them. What’s so special and record-breaking about forward somersaults?”

  “Here’s how I see it,” Henry said. “Nobody, especially not a guy our age, has even done one forward somersault, blindfolded, with their hands tied together and then to the handlebars. I’m sure it’s never been done. So even if we get one, we’ve got the record. And if we get four … well, that’s just the Most Awesome Thing Ever.”

  Riley looked up from his notes. “Henry, somebody will have to get pretty high to make four somersaults with a bicycle tied to his hands.”

  “Forty-seven feet,” Henry said. “I worked it out with a calculator.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s just that …,” Reed said. “I thought it was going to be hard.” He started laughing, then stopped when Henry and Riley didn’t join in. “Wait—you guys aren’t seriously considering that, are you?”

  Henry went on, “The hard part is going to be when you—”

  “You who? Who is you?” Reed sounded like an owl. “Who? Who?”

  “Who does this, you mean? Well, obviously, I’d like to, but I was the one who came up with the idea and I’ve done all the calculations and I’ll be point man during the jump, busy measuring and organizing and double-checking every safety detail. So it can’t be me.”

  Reed turned hopefully to Riley, who pointed to his notebook. “My talents are best suited to recording the event for posterity.”

  “Posterity,” Reed said with a resigned sigh, “sounds like a fancy way of saying ‘watching Reed get his butt kicked and his guts hung up on tree limbs approximately forty-seven feet off the ground.’”

  “Maybe,” Riley said. “Depending on luck.”

  “Nah,” Henry said. “Look at it this way: You were the least jazzed about the whole thing, so it’ll be that much more amazing if you’re the one to do the first adventure. Plus, it’ll be your name in the record books because you’ll be the record-breaker, the one everyone remembers.”

  “Oh, well, when you put it that way …” Reed didn’t sound convinced.

  Henry rubbed his hands together. “Good! Let’s get going; we’re wasting daylight.”

  “Today? Wh-wh-why s-s-so s-s-suddenly?” Reed’s right eye twitched and his teeth chattered.

  Henry and Riley looked at each other. They ignored Reed’s panic attack. They pulled him to his feet and started walking to his house to pick up his bicycle. Henry dragged a red wagon loaded with boxes as he debated with Riley about angles and height differentials and the virtue of measurements in feet versus meters. Reed staggered along in a fog of terror.

  Henry said, “I know the perfect place to do this.”

  Reed went into his garage and got his bike.

  “The Batsons’ house.” Henry nodded. “They’re away on vacation and my sister Lauren is feeding their guinea pigs and watering the plants. I borrowed their house key so we can get into the attic. They have a steeply pitched roof, which makes for the perfect angle sloping down to the backyard.” He started toward the Batsons’.

 
“Roof?” Reed hadn’t quite caught up. “You want me to ride off a roof?”

  “Of course. The distance from the roof to the ground will allow for the number of rotations we require. And we can’t underestimate the value of privacy—no one will disturb us or rip off our idea. Plus, and this is key, the Batsons are the only family in town with a Hydro 3000 super-reinforced, spring-loaded cover on their swimming pool.”

  “Wh-wh-wh-why d-d-d-does th-th-that m-m-m-matter?” Reed’s teeth started chattering again.

  “For altitude, in case you miss the diving board and, of course, as a safety net after you complete the stunt,” Henry said, shaking his head. “Isn’t that obvious? The additional bounce from the springs should assist you to do additional forward somersaults in midair before you come to rest. Who knows? You might even get six or seven.”

  “Is that legal?” Riley asked. “I’m pretty sure records are only valid if you follow all the rules. Otherwise the whole thing could wind up being for nothing.”

  “I looked up the regulations on the extreme bike website and there’s nothing about springboards being prohibited. You just can’t use a motor. Which was good to know even though it ruined my plan to attach an old Corvette engine to the bike and add speed to the equation.”

  “You want me to drive off the roof of a house and bounce on a diving board with a bicycle?” Reed had stopped walking. “That’s what you’re after here?”

  “Of course,” Henry said, “because just riding off the roof would be stupid. You start at the highest point of the roof, shoot down the incline, touch-and-go on the diving board and do the flips over the pool so that you eventually land on the cover, which is top-of-the-line and has the necessary, um”—he glanced down at his legal pad—“tensile strength to support your weight.”

  Riley looked up from his own set of notes. “Do the Batsons know we’re diving off their roof, bouncing a kid and a bike on their diving board and landing on their pool cover?”

  Henry shrugged. “Not really. I thought it best to keep our plans private.”

  “Good thinking.”